Aussie govt: Don’t criticize our (terrible) ‘Net filters

Stephen Conroy, Australia's Minister For Broadband, Communications and the …

Australia's plan to subject every Internet user in the country to mandatory content filtering just keeps getting stranger. Although the current government says it simply inherited the program from its predecessor and that the filtering will be voluntary, it seems intent on continuing the rollout plans even as it has become apparent that some level of filtering will be mandatory. Now, an Australian newspaper has uncovered documents showing that the government minister responsible for the program has ignored performance and accuracy problems with the filters, then tried to suppress criticism of the plan by private citizens.

The filtering plan as it now appears consists of two tiers. One would apply to all Australian Internet access and would block access to content deemed illegal (though how that term will be defined hasn't yet been disclosed). A second tier would be switched on by default, but users would be allowed to opt-out; this tier would target content inappropriate for children.

Back in June, however, the government's own Communications and Media Authority issued a report on tests on some of the equipment that might be used to implement the filters. Although the report puts a positive spin on the results—"Hey, the tech has gotten better since we last looked, in 2005!"—it's hard to get around the fact that the filters simply aren't that great. Five of the six filters degraded network performance by over 20 percent, and two simply hammered the network, dropping throughput by more than 75 percent.

That poor performance came without stellar filtering performance, either. Half the devices let more than five percent of the blacklist sites through anyway, and all devices had measurable percentages of false positives. And all of these problems came simply while trying to filter web traffic; FTP, P2P, and other protocols would all flow through the filters unimpeded.

Senator the Honorable
Stephen Conroy

If you read our earlier coverage on this matter, you'd see that one of the primary sources of information on the filtering program is a very unhappy ISP employee named Mark Newton, who is speaking on his own behalf, rather than that of his employer, Internode. Now, Australian newspaper The Ageis reporting that the ministry responsible for the program has contacted a trade group that includes Internode to request that the company keep a tighter leash on Newton.

The Age has also obtained an e-mail that a staffer in the office of Stephen Conroy, the government's Communications Minister, sent to the Internet Industry Association, of which Internode is also a member. "In your capacity as a board member of the IIA, I would like to express my serious concern that an IIA member would be sending out this sort of message," the e-mail said in part. It was apparently accompanied by a phone call in which it was made clear that this message should be passed on to Internode.

Little of this makes sense, of course, if the program were only something inherited from the prior administration that the current government had no intention of implementing.

Further reading:

Electronic Frontiers Australia has produced an analysis of the program and has a site dedicated to blocking its implementation.